SPEAKER_00: You can open your Bibles to the gospel according to Matthew chapter 22 is where we'll be tonight as you're making your way there.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I want to make sure you all knew that Ann McCarty passed away on Wednesday morning.
SPEAKER_00: She was the mother of Stephen McCarty.
SPEAKER_00: She used to sit right here in the uh front row at her evening service.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure uh you would recognize her uh or remember her.
SPEAKER_00: Um there will be a celebration of her life.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we're so thankful for her life and uh her faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: She was a believer in Christ and is uh now free from her from her pain.
SPEAKER_00: And uh we're thankful for the McCartys and how they cared for Stephen's mom and uh and kind of lent her to us in her fellowship and her worship over the uh the past years.
SPEAKER_00: Uh her celebration of life will be the 29th, which is I think is a Tuesday, uh here at Emanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm not sure of the time, um, but it's towards the end of November, the 29th, um, will be a chance to celebrate her life.
SPEAKER_00: So uh yeah, McCartys, we're sorry for your loss and grateful for uh your mom and and her faithfulness.
SPEAKER_00: So Matthew 22 tonight, let me pray briefly before we dive into God's word.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we are uh grateful for faith that you have given us the gift of belief.
SPEAKER_00: Uh we couldn't buy it, we couldn't earn it, you just gave it.
SPEAKER_00: Paul said this morning we were saved uh by a gift, in a gift, for a gift.
SPEAKER_00: And we're thankful that the gift of salvation, what you've given us, is ours now, uh, but it's it's yours.
SPEAKER_00: So tonight we turn our hearts and your word back to you, and we pray that your spirit would work in us to cause us to really believe and celebrate and rejoice the reality of heaven that Anne, of course, is experiencing now, also the reality of heaven that we just sang about.
SPEAKER_00: Um we uh can hold a baby and have uh no qualms about the future.
SPEAKER_00: You live in uncertain days, but or we don't know what the world would be like that our children grew up into, but we know that at the end of it uh there's confidence in the resurrection because you live.
SPEAKER_00: And so pray that you'd instill in us that same confidence tonight that we just sang with our lips.
SPEAKER_00: We ask this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Matthew 22, uh, verse 23 is where it'll be tonight.
SPEAKER_00: Um The same day, the Sadducees came to him who say that there is no resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: And they asked him a question, saying, Teacher, Moses said, If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up his offspring for his brother.
SPEAKER_00: Now there were seven brothers among us.
SPEAKER_00: The first married and died, and having no offspring left his wife to his brother.
SPEAKER_00: So to the second and the third down to the seventh.
SPEAKER_00: Dot dot dot dot dot.
SPEAKER_00: After them all, the woman died.
SPEAKER_00: In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be?
SPEAKER_00: For they all had her.
SPEAKER_00: We'll save the conclusion for later.
SPEAKER_00: There is a certain logic at minds, though.
SPEAKER_00: There's a certain logic at work in the mind of people that rejects the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: It's an excuse that I have often heard.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it comes in the form of a question from a visitor in the hallway afterwards, and the question usually starts like this I have asked every Christian I know or every pastor I know this question, and no one can explain it to me, the implication being that's why I'm not a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: So they've crafted in their mind some like slam dunk hypothetical.
SPEAKER_00: And no pastor, no Christian anywhere can answer it.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, the Bible can't be trusted.
SPEAKER_00: Did Adam have a belly button?
SPEAKER_00: And you call yourself a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: Now there is a logical truth operating the backgrounds behind that question.
SPEAKER_00: The logical truth is that if the Bible is inspired, meaning breathed out by God, written under the direction of the Holy Spirit, if it's a divine book, if the Bible is inspired, then it would be inerrant.
SPEAKER_00: So if this is the word of God from God Himself, inspired by His Spirit, then there can't be anything wrong with it.
SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna have any errors in it.
SPEAKER_00: So inspired just means, you know, God breathed it.
SPEAKER_00: Inerrant means there's no errors inside of it.
SPEAKER_00: If it is inspired, therefore it has to be inerrant.
SPEAKER_00: So there's a logic there.
SPEAKER_00: So if there is something incorrect in the Bible, if there is a contradiction or something that's not true in the Bible, then you can doubt the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's the window, when one part of it breaks, the whole thing breaks.
SPEAKER_00: So if there is something wrong with the Bible, the whole thing can be doubted.
SPEAKER_00: And it can't be doubted because uh if one part is wrong, therefore logically everything else in it is false.
SPEAKER_00: That's not why you can doubt it.
SPEAKER_00: But you would be allowed to doubt it because if one part is wrong, that means the whole thing is not inspired, which means therefore it has no authority to be binding over your moral life.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the the logic that's at play there.
SPEAKER_00: And I hope uh people understand that.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this whole thing stands or falls as a book.
SPEAKER_00: Either it's true or it's not.
SPEAKER_00: And if any part of it is not true, then it might be a nice collection of stories and there might be good moral lessons in there for you to teach your kids and whatnot, but it certainly doesn't have authority over your life or tell you what's gonna happen to you when you die.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the logic that is that is true.
SPEAKER_00: That is truth right there.
SPEAKER_00: And it's operating in the background behind the question.
SPEAKER_00: But notice how the question gets changed when the skeptic asks it.
SPEAKER_00: The skeptic asks, can you explain this complicated part of the Bible?
SPEAKER_00: And if I can't understand that, then I can reject the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see how the goalpost got moved there?
SPEAKER_00: The logical truth is if something is wrong with it, then it's not inspired.
SPEAKER_00: But it gets changed to, if I can't understand all of it, then I don't have to understand any of it.
SPEAKER_00: Do you see how those two are not the same statement?
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is inspired, it is inerrant.
SPEAKER_00: If there was something wrong with it, then it wouldn't be inspired, therefore it wouldn't be inerrant, which is very different than saying, if I don't understand all of it, I don't have to believe any of it.
SPEAKER_00: Would you want a God who you could completely understand?
SPEAKER_00: And I think some people have that God and they look at him every morning in the mirror, or her every morning in the mirror.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is you don't understand the totality of God.
SPEAKER_00: He's incomprehensible.
SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things the Bible says about him is that he is incomprehensible.
SPEAKER_00: We can't behold him, our puny minds can't understand his entirety.
SPEAKER_00: We can understand what he communicates to us to an extent in his word.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible itself is a form of accommodation brought by the Holy Spirit from heaven to earth, written to us in a way we can understand, but he can't explain God in his fullness, of course not.
SPEAKER_00: But sometimes the skeptics don't see the difference between themselves and God.
SPEAKER_00: They make themselves the judge of truth, and so they say, if I can't understand how the hard things are true, then I reject the easy things.
SPEAKER_00: That is the great skeptical fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: I want to give you a brief outline here.
SPEAKER_00: First is the hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: The hypocrite's fallacy is seen in the passage we just read.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees came to him, and it says in the same day, the Sadducees are coming to Jesus now in an order here.
SPEAKER_00: It's through Herodians first, uh, then the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_00: These are the groups of people that make up the kind of the rulers of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the goal in our series, this questioning Jesus series, is we're tracking how these rulers are trying to trap Jesus with his questions.
SPEAKER_00: They realize they can't outmaneuver him militarily.
SPEAKER_00: He's got the support of the people, they can't just ambush him and kill him.
SPEAKER_00: So their attempt here now on Tuesday of this Passion Week is to trap him in his words.
SPEAKER_00: This is their last attempt to bring him down.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's a series of questions.
SPEAKER_00: The questions began, if you recall, with them asking Jesus by what authority he was operating under, who gave him the authority to do these things.
SPEAKER_00: That was part one of this series.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus' response was basically to refuse to answer the question.
SPEAKER_00: He asked them, by what authority did John the Baptist preach?
SPEAKER_00: By the authority of God or not?
SPEAKER_00: And they didn't want to answer that because the crowd loved John the Baptist as well.
SPEAKER_00: And so they were silenced and they went away embarrassed.
SPEAKER_00: They huddled up, they came up with this new approach, they divided into thirds here, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, uh, and the Herodians.
SPEAKER_00: The Herodians were the party of Herod.
SPEAKER_00: All three are asking questions that are totally contradictory to their worldview.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the the crazy thing about these three questions they're gonna, one, two, three here, is that they're all asked by a person who doesn't even believe the question they're asking.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the the first question was the Herodians asking, is it okay to pay taxes to Caesar?
SPEAKER_00: They're called the Herodians because they're the pro-Roman party, and yet they're feigning like they're offended by the coin because of its idolatry.
SPEAKER_00: The Herodians, for goodness sake.
SPEAKER_00: This question is brought to you by the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees are always sad, you see.
SPEAKER_00: Why are they so sad, you see?
SPEAKER_00: Because they don't believe in the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees come from a long line of people who refuse to believe the truth about heaven.
SPEAKER_00: They reject the concept of an afterlife.
SPEAKER_00: Something that they say was brought into the Bible later.
SPEAKER_00: So they refuse to listen to what Jesus says about earth because they reject what he says about heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Again, a very typical approach from people who confuse heaven and earth.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus has often in his ministry staked his ability to preach about earth because of his origins in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Remember what he told Nicodemus, you're the teacher of Israel and you don't know these things.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, you know, if you Jesus tells Nicodemus, and he rebukes him in John chapter 3, if you don't believe what I say about earth, how are you going to believe what I speak about heaven?
SPEAKER_00: I'm speaking about things that I've seen, Jesus tells Nicodemus that you haven't seen.
SPEAKER_00: That goes back to John chapter 1.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is from the bosom of God.
SPEAKER_00: He's speaking of his eternal generation.
SPEAKER_00: He's from God's side.
SPEAKER_00: And he comes to earth to tell us the truth about God and the truth about heaven.
SPEAKER_00: And if so, if why would you reject that?
SPEAKER_00: He's the only one that has seen what he's talking about.
SPEAKER_00: He told Nicodemus that.
SPEAKER_00: Remember when the person in the lame person was lowered to the roof?
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, Your sins are forgiven, and the Pharisees lost their beards, they were so upset.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says, to show you that I have the authority to forgive sins.
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell him to pick up your, you know, his mat and walk, but which is actually harder to do.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, there are the same syllables in in Greek.
SPEAKER_00: It's not like one's harder to say than the other.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is identifying, though, the reality that what he says about heaven is true and validated on earth to prove that he can cause the guy to be healed physically to demonstrate that he speaks with authority about the spiritual side.
SPEAKER_00: They're joins.
SPEAKER_00: Yet the skeptics often say, I reject what the Bible says about heaven because I don't like what it says about earth.
SPEAKER_00: That's the hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: Understand and appreciate for a moment with this that the Pharisees and Sadducees have differences.
SPEAKER_00: They were often rivals, they often had their own disputes.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees believed ostensibly in divine sovereignty.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees believed in free will, the triumph of free will.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees believed that they couldn't understand the mysterious ways God worked in the world, but God was at work over all things.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees rejected that God, and the Sadducees at least had a logical cohesion to the argument.
SPEAKER_00: They rejected the idea of the supernatural in the world because, you know, they rejected the idea that God could be sovereign over some things, but not all things.
SPEAKER_00: And so they have a little bit going for them right there.
SPEAKER_00: You know, if God's not sovereign over all things, he can't be sovereign over anything, was the Sadducees' logic.
SPEAKER_00: And so they just removed the supernatural from this world.
SPEAKER_00: Free will ruled the day according to the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: What human volition, that was, was primary, and what human volition opted to do, God couldn't restrain.
SPEAKER_00: So that was the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: They elevated human volition and free will.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees, of course, elevated the law.
SPEAKER_00: That's going to be important.
SPEAKER_00: Next week we'll look at the Pharisees, Lord willing, with their question.
SPEAKER_00: Pharisees elevated the law.
SPEAKER_00: They were pharisaical about it, you could say.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees were much more dismissive of the law.
SPEAKER_00: Some commentators say the Sadducees were okay with loose living.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees believed in angels and demons.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees did not believe in either.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees accepted what we call the Old Testament as God's written revelation to mankind.
SPEAKER_00: It included the written tradition, the Torah, the writings, and the prophets according to the Pharisees, as well as the oral traditions.
SPEAKER_00: That's why the Pharisees were always in rabbinical debates, because they believed in the written tradition as well as the oral tradition.
SPEAKER_00: It could be furthered by, they created their own oral traditions, the Pharisees sparred.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees rejected all of that as nonsense.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees received the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the law of Moses, they believed that.
SPEAKER_00: Everything else they said came out of the oral traditions.
SPEAKER_00: So they rejected the history books as authoritative.
SPEAKER_00: They maybe would have said some things, you know, the book of Kings and Chronicles might be true, but it's certainly not authoritative.
SPEAKER_00: They rejected the Psalms as guides for worship.
SPEAKER_00: They rejected the Proverbs as any kind of authoritative wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: They rejected basically all of the Old Testament except the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: The most important distinction between the two, though, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, is what you see in the story.
SPEAKER_00: Because of that rejection, the Sadducees dug their heels in on rejecting the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees taught that this life is all there is.
SPEAKER_00: When you died according to the Sadducees, your soul went to Sheol.
SPEAKER_00: Soul sleep.
SPEAKER_00: Word is done.
SPEAKER_00: And the body is lost forever.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why did the Sadducees deny angels, demons, afterlife, etc.?
SPEAKER_00: Because they said you can't teach those from the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: They were so dogmatic against the oral tradition, they rejected those things, saying they're not taught in the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is going to point out to them tonight their basic underlying presupposition that those things don't come from the Torah isn't even true.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I'm titling this part The Hypocrites' Fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: So often the hypocrites, and they're obviously being hypocritical here, that the Sadducees don't believe in the resurrection, and they're asking Jesus a tongue-twister riddle about the resurrection that they don't even believe in.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they're hypocrites here.
SPEAKER_00: But so often the way hypocrites function is the basis of their own question they don't even believe.
SPEAKER_00: They're not even right about it.
SPEAKER_00: Sadducees only supposedly received the Torah, rejected the afterlife because it's not in the Torah, and Jesus is going to illustrate to them that the afterlife is indeed in the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: The whole basis of their man-made religion is false.
SPEAKER_00: And yet it is in Scripture here, Matthew 21, 22, verse 23 and forward.
SPEAKER_00: And I love that the story has been given to us by the Lord, by Matthew and Mark, both uh communicate this story to us.
SPEAKER_00: I love that because it is often how the hypocrite works.
SPEAKER_00: It is so common for people to reject the clear teachings of Scripture because they can't understand complicated hypotheticals.
SPEAKER_00: That's what the Sadducees are doing here.
SPEAKER_00: They have this far-fetched question about a woman who's been, you know, married seven times, and if you can't answer that question, therefore the Bible's not clear about heaven.
SPEAKER_00: But the truth is, again, you have to remember this when you're dealing with that kind of objection.
SPEAKER_00: The truth doesn't rise or fall on a complicated hypothetical.
SPEAKER_00: The plain things that Scripture says are true because they're plainly true, even if you can't understand every answer to every far-fetched hypothetical.
SPEAKER_00: How typical is it for people to reject difficult things of the scripture and justify that to reject clear things of the scripture?
SPEAKER_00: There are difficult things in the Bible, you know?
SPEAKER_00: There are.
SPEAKER_00: There are hard things in the Bible to understand.
SPEAKER_00: But that doesn't mean the Bible's not true.
SPEAKER_00: It just means that there's hard things in the Bible to understand.
SPEAKER_00: I comfort myself thinking that if I was smarter, there'd be less hard things to understand.
SPEAKER_00: Some of it's my own frailty.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Peter did, do you remember?
SPEAKER_00: Peter said, you know, people are always twisting Paul's words like they do the rest of the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: But the truth is there's some things Paul says that are hard to understand.
SPEAKER_00: That's where that's how Peter went to sleep at night.
SPEAKER_00: Like, man, Paul, that rabbi, he can't keep up with that guy.
SPEAKER_00: Keep writing, brother.
SPEAKER_00: Go for it.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to sleep.
SPEAKER_00: That's not a bad place to be.
SPEAKER_00: So here's their tongue-twisting question, verse 24.
SPEAKER_00: Teacher, they address him as teacher.
SPEAKER_00: The Herodians did that last week, too, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharisees will do that next week in verse 36.
SPEAKER_00: So they're, again, this is total flattery, total flattery.
SPEAKER_00: Moses said, notice the Sadducees' question.
SPEAKER_00: Starts with Moses, the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: At least they're in the right book.
SPEAKER_00: If a man dies having no children, his brother must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother.
SPEAKER_00: This is the principle of Levereite marriage.
SPEAKER_00: Levereite marriage is taught in, well, Genesis 38, of course, but Deuteronomy 25 is where it's expressly taught.
SPEAKER_00: Genesis 38 is Onan and that passage, but Deuteronomy 25 is where it becomes encoded in the Mosaic law that if a couple is married and the husband dies, and they don't have any kids, that's the key part of this, they don't have any kids, and the husband's brother has to marry the widow now to produce offspring for them.
SPEAKER_00: So that's that's leverate marriage.
SPEAKER_00: It's described in the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: Sounds so odd to us.
SPEAKER_00: It's just not something that's in the American culture.
SPEAKER_00: That's because the American culture has like wills and other ways of transferring property, and you know, we don't have the year of Jubilee, and all the property doesn't reset every 50 years.
SPEAKER_00: In the Jewish world, it did.
SPEAKER_00: So if you didn't have any offspring, there was no way to pass down your family property and your inheritance and your wealth and all that.
SPEAKER_00: So it was critical importance that you were able to the widow is a protection of the widow.
SPEAKER_00: They had to have the offspring as well as the husband who died in order to keep the family and the lands and possessions intact.
SPEAKER_00: Spares people from bankruptcy and just total chaos.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the law that's there.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, the most well-known example of this is the marriage of Ruth when her husband died, and she is an immigrant back to Israel then, and she is able to marry Boaz because of this law.
SPEAKER_00: So the Sadducees are asking a question about this.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, the Sadducees believe in Leveret marriage because it's in the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: They don't believe in the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: So they're kind of making fun of it.
SPEAKER_00: This whole question is making fun of verse 25.
SPEAKER_00: There were seven brothers among us.
SPEAKER_00: So this is clearly a hypothetical, but they are asking it as if it's real.
SPEAKER_00: Seven brothers among us.
SPEAKER_00: The first married and died, having no offspring, left his wife to his brother, so the terms of Leveret marriage are established.
SPEAKER_00: So see the second, third, and down to the seventh.
SPEAKER_00: Man, how dumb is the like the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh guy?
SPEAKER_00: What did he think was going to happen?
SPEAKER_00: But all seven married, they all died.
SPEAKER_00: So why this question?
SPEAKER_00: Um, verse 27.
SPEAKER_00: After that, the woman died in the resurrection of the seven, whose wife will she be?
SPEAKER_00: Remember, they don't even believe in the resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: What's behind this question is in their minds, this hypothetical shows you how absurd the idea of the resurrection is.
SPEAKER_00: That's why they're telling this story.
SPEAKER_00: This is a story when the Sadducees stayed up late at night in college arguing with the Pharisees around the vending machines.
SPEAKER_00: This was the story they would bring out and stump the Pharisees with.
SPEAKER_00: This was their slam dunk story right there.
SPEAKER_00: Aha.
SPEAKER_00: What about this?
SPEAKER_00: You know?
SPEAKER_00: Seven husbands.
SPEAKER_00: Who's she gonna be married to?
SPEAKER_00: She could have seven husbands in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Now, before we pick apart this question, let me show you something that's cool about this question.
SPEAKER_00: This question, just his existence, demonstrates what the Bible teaches about marriage, is true and is clear.
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees don't even go down the road about marriage.
SPEAKER_00: In the Sadducees' mind, it's like obvious that polygamy is outside of God's design for marriage.
SPEAKER_00: Because that would be a very easy answer to this question.
SPEAKER_00: She has seven husbands.
SPEAKER_00: There you go.
SPEAKER_00: I mean that.
SPEAKER_00: They don't even.
SPEAKER_00: Leave you an opportunity for that to be the answer.
SPEAKER_00: So the Bible's teaching about marriage is pretty clear, even to a Sadducee.
SPEAKER_00: But I do want to say a couple more things about this.
SPEAKER_00: First, the let me spell out the exact hypocrisy of this.
SPEAKER_00: This is their logic.
SPEAKER_00: If people believe this foolish thing and this true thing, then both must be false.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: You believe something foolish, you know, they find like the most absurd Christian in the world, and there's a Christian over there that believed the slavery was good, therefore all Christians are bad.
SPEAKER_00: That's the hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: You believe ten things, nine of them are true, one is false, therefore all ten are false.
SPEAKER_00: That's the hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: It's not good logic, it's not good thinking, it's definitely what the Sadducees are doing.
SPEAKER_00: They developed a hypothetical that they think shows how ridiculous the afterlife is, therefore the afterlife can't be true, because their hypothetical doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: That's their hypocrite's fallacy.
SPEAKER_00: One more thing about the story that I find interesting.
SPEAKER_00: This story is not invented by them out of you know thin air.
SPEAKER_00: This story comes from the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: This is an apocryphal story.
SPEAKER_00: It's from Tobit chapter 3.
SPEAKER_00: The Apocrypha is that section of books in the Bible, uh, in the Catholic Bible anyway, that was written in the 400 years of silence between the end of Malachi, the end of the Old Testament, and the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: There's other books that were written during that time that in the Catholic Church they have said, you know, it has authority in Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: In the Catholic Church, it's part of the oral church tradition.
SPEAKER_00: You know, a well-versed Catholic would probably say, you know, it's not technically part of the Bible, but it is authoritative because it comes from church tradition kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: That was around during Jesus' lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: Uh a lot of Bibles.
SPEAKER_00: There's you know, if you go to Barnes and Noble to buy a Bible, there'll be the Catholic Bible section.
SPEAKER_00: What is the difference between a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible?
SPEAKER_00: It's this the existence of the Apocrypha in it.
SPEAKER_00: When I first got saved, I told my friends I'd become a Christian and uh she brought me, she bought me a nice Bible as a gift.
SPEAKER_00: Uh she bought it at you know some some bookstore and gave it to me as a gift, and so I got a got a pretty cool Bible and went on my first youth retreat.
SPEAKER_00: I was a uh right at the end of like the summer after my senior in high school.
SPEAKER_00: I went with a high school youth group on a youth retreat.
SPEAKER_00: I was not raised in the church, this was like a new experience to me, you know, kids loading up in buses and going somewhere, and it was it was fun.
SPEAKER_00: And early in the morning at our youth retreat, we had our quiet time, and I'm a brand new Christian, but I know a quiet time.
SPEAKER_00: I usually read your Bibles, and so I get out my Bible and thunk and open it to the middle and start reading, which is the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: And the youth pastor's like making his rounds, you know, walking, walking, looking all over the high school kid's shoulders, and uh the youth pastor asked me, Hey, what are you reading?
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, that's the dumbest question I've ever heard.
SPEAKER_00: I thought you were the pastor.
SPEAKER_00: What am I reading?
SPEAKER_00: The Bible.
SPEAKER_00: This is Yeah, I'm a new Christian, but I know that you're reading the Bible during devotionals.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, the Bible?
SPEAKER_00: Duh.
SPEAKER_00: And he says, All right, what book are you reading?
SPEAKER_00: And I look down and Bell and the Dragon.
SPEAKER_00: And he had to laugh kind of like you're laughing, and it asked me what it's about.
SPEAKER_00: Uh it dawned on me that I don't think this guy is familiar with Bell and the Dragon.
SPEAKER_00: What kind of pastor is he?
SPEAKER_00: Where'd he go to seminary?
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I tried to describe the Bell and the Dragon story, and he's like, okay, I'm gonna get you a new Bible when you get home.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I learned about the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: You know, in the New Testament, all the sections of the Old Testament are quoted.
SPEAKER_00: They're all cited as scripture.
SPEAKER_00: By Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: He cites the history, the prophets, the writing, the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: He cites all of them as scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The wisdom literature cited by our Lord as scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The New Testament authors cite all of the Old Testament as Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The only exception is the Apocrypha, never mentioned in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: It was around during Jesus' lifetime, never cited as authoritative, never cited as anything except here.
SPEAKER_00: This is the only citation related to the Apocrypha in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's the end of Jude and that stuff from Enoch, but then you get this here.
SPEAKER_00: It's the Sadducees floating out their apocryphal story from Tobit chapter 3 about a woman who has a bunch of husbands and who she's going to be married to.
SPEAKER_00: This is from the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: Why does the Catholic Church have the Apocrypha?
SPEAKER_00: And the short answer from that is so much of their doctrine about the afterlife depends on it.
SPEAKER_00: The Apocrypha is what teaches about purgatory.
SPEAKER_00: And the idea that when you die, your soul doesn't go to heaven, but it goes to a place of purging, all that's apocryphal.
SPEAKER_00: And so you've got the Sadducees latching onto that part of the Apocrypha.
SPEAKER_00: The very reason it's still present in the Catholic Church today is what the Sadducees locked their fingers into to expose how foolish that was.
SPEAKER_00: And you're going to be blown away, by the way, when you see how Jesus interacts with the Apocrypha in about two verses here.
SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to just make sure you have this impressed in your mind right now.
SPEAKER_00: The logical fallacy is that if you believe a foolish thing, then nine other true things you believe must also be false.
SPEAKER_00: It's a shallow way of arguing, and Jesus sees right through it.
SPEAKER_00: Right through it.
SPEAKER_00: The hypocrite's fallacy gives way to Scripture's fidelity.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture's fidelity.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the rebuke that Jesus has, verse 29.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus answered them, You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: Which is a bold thing to say to the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: The Sanhedrin is there, the Pharisees are there, it's the religious leaders of Israel, and Jesus blasts them for not knowing the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus has a point.
SPEAKER_00: So many human objections, so many problems in this world come from people just not knowing the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: They have these comp they build their lives, their whole religious system around these complicated doctrines they invent.
SPEAKER_00: And the bottom line is they don't know the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what Jesus says here.
SPEAKER_00: You know, this is imagine the Sadducees shock at this, because this is their like go-to argument to show how the Pharisees are wrong.
SPEAKER_00: They bring it to Jesus, and his response is, you guys, I'm sorry to say this, but you don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have a fat clue.
SPEAKER_00: You're not aware of what the Bible actually teaches.
SPEAKER_00: Heaven, Jesus says, is spiritual.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 30.
SPEAKER_00: For in the resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: So that's his answer.
SPEAKER_00: You don't figure out what heaven is like from studying earth, is Jesus' answer.
SPEAKER_00: You don't deduce the realities of heaven by looking horizontally on earth.
SPEAKER_00: There's two different axes here.
SPEAKER_00: The vertical axis, eyes to heaven, horizontal axis, eyes on earth.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot deduce what is true about heaven by studying earth.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus has the authority to teach the truth of earth because he's from heaven.
SPEAKER_00: You do not have the authority to teach the truth of heaven because you've analyzed earth.
SPEAKER_00: Being smart about earthly things does not make you smart about God things.
SPEAKER_00: I wish people remembered that more.
SPEAKER_00: Man, you ask movie stars and politicians like important ethical questions.
SPEAKER_00: What in the world?
SPEAKER_00: Or on God?
SPEAKER_00: Every time I see some physicist with three PhDs talking about how the Bible's not true, it just makes me throw up in my mouth.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the guy has like an astrophysicist, so he becomes an expert on scripture?
SPEAKER_00: What in the world?
SPEAKER_00: That's the Sadducees right here.
SPEAKER_00: You guys don't know what you're talking about because you're reasoning to heaven based upon what you see on earth.
SPEAKER_00: Man, that's just the wrong starting point.
SPEAKER_00: If your worldview starts with earth, you will not see very far.
SPEAKER_00: The earth is curved, you can't even all see around it.
SPEAKER_00: You're not an expert about things in heaven because you've analyzed the earth.
SPEAKER_00: That's Jesus' response.
SPEAKER_00: With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: Very offensive to these people, of course.
SPEAKER_00: Like telling a Supreme Court justice, I'm sorry, you don't understand the basics of legal theory.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, ten-term congressman, you don't understand the basics of politics.
SPEAKER_00: That's what Jesus' answer boils down to.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: Your problem is that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Look, if heaven was just an extension of this life, I wouldn't want to believe in the resurrection either.
SPEAKER_00: If the resurrection in heaven was just a continuation of this world, why bother?
SPEAKER_00: But it's not.
SPEAKER_00: It's fundamentally different.
SPEAKER_00: In heaven, you neither marry nor given in marriage.
SPEAKER_00: You don't marry, that's for men.
SPEAKER_00: You're not given to marriage, that's for women.
SPEAKER_00: Marriage was designed to be a picture, of course, of God's relationship with his church.
SPEAKER_00: It was designed to be a sweet gift of grace for life in this fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: It's a picture of things that play out in this life.
SPEAKER_00: In heaven, there's no loneliness.
SPEAKER_00: In heaven, there's no frailty.
SPEAKER_00: In heaven, there's no subdue the earth and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: That's for earth.
SPEAKER_00: There's no need for common grace on a resurrected planet.
SPEAKER_00: Marriage is a common grace given to us to live in this fallen world.
SPEAKER_00: It's not true in glory.
SPEAKER_00: But this doesn't mean there's no bodies in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: That's where the Sadducees went.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, there's no bodies in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: No, you have bodies in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus himself says, when the dead rise, obviously we have bodies.
SPEAKER_00: Look at verse 31.
SPEAKER_00: As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God?
SPEAKER_00: So Jesus here endorses the resurrection of the dead.
SPEAKER_00: It's a slam dunk on the Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: He puts his law in against the Sadducees' teaching.
SPEAKER_00: He believes in the resurrection of the dead.
SPEAKER_00: And he says to them, Have you not read what was said to you by God?
SPEAKER_00: And now he quotes Exodus 3, verse 6.
SPEAKER_00: Notice that what he's quoting to the Sadducees is from the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: It's from the part of the Bible that they received.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus could have gone to the Psalms to prove heaven.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't receive the Psalms.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, he goes to the Torah.
SPEAKER_00: Quoting verse 6 of chapter 3.
SPEAKER_00: I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
SPEAKER_00: This is in Exodus 3, it's Yahweh speaking to Moses.
SPEAKER_00: Moses says, Who do I say, sent me?
SPEAKER_00: And you know, who are you in the burning bush?
SPEAKER_00: That's this passage.
SPEAKER_00: And Yahweh tells him, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus now adds, Is he not?
SPEAKER_00: Is he not, or he is not God of the dead, but of the living?
SPEAKER_00: Remember in Exodus 3, verse 6, it ends with Moses hiding his face because he was afraid to look at God.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus brings that passage out and says, Do you think God is the God of dead people?
SPEAKER_00: And this would be against what the Sadducees say, remember?
SPEAKER_00: So how does God in Exodus 3 verse 6 identify as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who are all three dead when Moses is alive, if he is.
SPEAKER_00: If there's no resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: Where are those three people?
SPEAKER_00: God is speaking in the present tense.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus hinges his argument on the Hebrew verb tense.
SPEAKER_00: I am the God.
SPEAKER_00: Later in or earlier in John's gospel, he used that same passage, that same passage to identify himself as Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: Before Abraham was, I am, he says.
SPEAKER_00: He's linking himself to that divine name.
SPEAKER_00: It's wrapped up in the name Yahweh.
SPEAKER_00: I am that I am.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus links himself with Yahweh and declares that Yahweh is the God of the living, not of the dead.
SPEAKER_00: This devastates the Sadducees' argument.
SPEAKER_00: You can picture the Pharisees looking at each other and going, man, I wish I would have thought of that.
SPEAKER_00: What are the Sadducees going to do?
SPEAKER_00: Deny that he's the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?
SPEAKER_00: This is Passover week.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody is there to celebrate Passover.
SPEAKER_00: What's he gonna say?
SPEAKER_00: No, the promises are only true when the generation is alive?
SPEAKER_00: They're celebrating Passover, which was given to Moses.
SPEAKER_00: Moses is dead.
SPEAKER_00: Is God the God of Moses?
SPEAKER_00: The Sadducees box themselves in with their silly question.
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, a promise is only as good as long as the one who promised it is living.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole point of remarriage when your spouse dies.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus takes their very logic and uses it against them.
SPEAKER_00: If the promise only exists while the person is living, that's the foundation for leverate marriage.
SPEAKER_00: If the spouse has died, you can remarry.
SPEAKER_00: If that's true, then how is God the God of people that are dead?
SPEAKER_00: They have to still be living in some sense.
SPEAKER_00: The point is that heaven is forever.
SPEAKER_00: The promises do not run out with those who received it.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus has a lot more riding on this truth than you see in this little exchange, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_00: Because he is going to die in a few days.
SPEAKER_00: Three days from now he will die.
SPEAKER_00: Six days from now he will resurrect.
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot more at stake here than the Sadducees even understand.
SPEAKER_00: If there is no resurrection from the dead, bodily resurrection from the dead, by the way, if there's no bodily resurrection from the dead, then there is no resurrection at all worth mentioning.
SPEAKER_00: And I do fear, I do fear that so many Christians today have lost the firm belief in the bodily resurrection from the dead.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I would, I'm I'm just shocked how many times I talk about the resurrection from the dead and encounter people who tell me that they've never heard that before.
SPEAKER_00: They thought, you know, resurrection is just their their souls go to heaven, you know, my body's in the ground, my body's buried, or body's decomposed, or how will I get a new body then?
SPEAKER_00: They use that as anything like Sadducees.
SPEAKER_00: You know, so-and-so died and their body was torn by the beasts and eaten and all that.
SPEAKER_00: So, where do they get a new body?
SPEAKER_00: So resurrection's got to be just spiritual.
SPEAKER_00: No, it is a physical resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: God will reconstitute everybody, physically resurrect them from the grave.
SPEAKER_00: Of course he will.
SPEAKER_00: When you die, your body goes into the grave, your soul goes to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: This is different in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament, the saints died, their soul went to Sheol, their body went to the ground, their soul went to Sheol.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, when he dies, he goes to Sheol, takes the souls of the righteous in Sheol and elevates them to heaven, resurrection Sunday from them, they go up.
SPEAKER_00: They're in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Now, when you die, your body goes down, your soul goes up to be with their souls.
SPEAKER_00: When Jesus returns, all those souls will be with him.
SPEAKER_00: He will resurrect their bodies from the ground, their soul and their body will be united, and they will reign with him physically forever.
SPEAKER_00: Those who died apart from faith in Christ, their bodies go in the ground, their souls go to Sheol.
SPEAKER_00: At the end of the thousand-year kingdom, Jesus will return to earth with those souls, take them out of Sheol, resurrect their bodies, join them together, and cast them into hell for physical suffering forever.
SPEAKER_00: So there is a physical resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: If there's not a physical resurrection, this is Paul's logic in 1 Corinthians 15.
SPEAKER_00: If there's not a physical resurrection, then Jesus didn't rise from the grave.
SPEAKER_00: If Jesus didn't rise from the grave, what are we doing in an evening service, you know?
SPEAKER_00: May as well eat, drink, and be merry, Paul says.
SPEAKER_00: But he did rise.
SPEAKER_00: Nor in the logic of Exodus III.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it might seem like such a fine point you'd figure out a way to argue against it.
SPEAKER_00: That's why it's important to understand Jesus doesn't just preach in Exodus 3 and teach in Exodus 3 and exegete Exodus 3.
SPEAKER_00: He's going to live it out by resurrecting from the dead himself.
SPEAKER_00: So that's how a skeptic interacts with the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: Coming up with ridiculous hypotheticals to justify unbelief.
SPEAKER_00: How does a believer interact with the Bible?
SPEAKER_00: You believe it, and you receive it, and you live your life on it.
SPEAKER_00: One illustration from that.
SPEAKER_00: I've talked to you much about Jonathan Edwards, my theological hero, the greatest intellect the Americas have ever known.
SPEAKER_00: Died of a smallpox vaccination at age 54.
SPEAKER_00: He was the third president of Princeton, graduate, valedictorian of Yale, gave his valedictorian address at Yale in Latin, one of those kind of guys when he was 17.
SPEAKER_00: When he was at Yale, he met Sarah.
SPEAKER_00: She was, or in New York, he met Sarah.
SPEAKER_00: She was 13.
SPEAKER_00: He was an associate pastor in New York at 19 years old.
SPEAKER_00: And he met this 13-year-old and they fell in love.
SPEAKER_00: He waited until she turned 17 to marry her.
SPEAKER_00: Still a little weird, I'll give you that.
SPEAKER_00: Sarah was her name.
SPEAKER_00: Together they had 11 children, 10 of whom survived into survived childhood into adulthood.
SPEAKER_00: His children are in many ways his own legacy, and we know Jonathan Edwards from his preaching, his sermons, his writing, his scientific innovations, et cetera, including the smallpox vaccine.
SPEAKER_00: But in many ways, his real legacy was his children.
SPEAKER_00: They were active in the abolition movement.
SPEAKER_00: They became missionaries.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them became missionaries to the slave plantations in the Caribbean.
SPEAKER_00: Edwards, in many ways, is well known for his diary of David Brainerd, the famous missionary David Brainerd was sick with tuberculosis.
SPEAKER_00: The Indians put him on a horse and chewed the horse to Edwards' house when he was living with the Indians.
SPEAKER_00: And after Edwards got fired from his church, he moved out to the Indian village.
SPEAKER_00: He could have gone anywhere.
SPEAKER_00: He was offered pastorates in London and New York, all over the place.
SPEAKER_00: He chose to go to an Indian village and translate the Bible into an Indian dialect.
SPEAKER_00: He had conflict with the Indians, but he also started a church there.
SPEAKER_00: He had conflict with the uh other white people in the village that worked at the kind of the paper mill kind of there.
SPEAKER_00: There was all kinds of conflicts there.
SPEAKER_00: And yet his wife was by his side for so many of these trials, Sarah was.
SPEAKER_00: So many of these trials.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he got fired from his church in Northampton and stayed in the parsonage for another year.
SPEAKER_00: After they hired, could you imagine living as just the guy, living at the church that just fired you?
SPEAKER_00: And he still preached, by the way, often in that year when they couldn't find somebody else.
SPEAKER_00: We know you.
SPEAKER_00: We fired you, but could you come bring the word today?
SPEAKER_00: But imagine being his wife through that.
SPEAKER_00: See that kind of conflict.
SPEAKER_00: Then out to the Indian village, David Brainerd's dying, they put him on a horse, chase him over to his house, their kids nurse him back to health, one of whom dies probably from exposure to the disease and that.
SPEAKER_00: Just insane stuff.
SPEAKER_00: When he left the Indian village, he went to Princeton as their third president.
SPEAKER_00: And it was there that he received a smallpox vaccination that um causes windpipe to collapse and close up and he couldn't breathe.
SPEAKER_00: And he knew he was dying, he didn't have much time.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't want his wife to find out about his death from his own hand.
SPEAKER_00: He wanted somebody else to tell her.
SPEAKER_00: So in his last moments of life, he wrote a letter to his daughter, Lucy.
SPEAKER_00: He tells Lucy, My dearest Lucy, just writing this on his deathbed.
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me to be the will of God that I must shortly leave you.
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, I give my kindest love to my dear wife.
SPEAKER_00: I tell her that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us, has been such a nature as I trust is spiritual, and therefore will continue forever.
SPEAKER_00: That's his parting words.
SPEAKER_00: He has words to his daughters as well.
SPEAKER_00: I d I didn't put his whole letter up here.
SPEAKER_00: He tells them he hopes his death will cause him to seek the father that will never fail them.
SPEAKER_00: Well, he has failed them, he hopes.
SPEAKER_00: They turn to his heavenly father.
SPEAKER_00: Sarah, by the way, would write a book about her marriage to Jonathan called Marriage to a Difficult Man.
SPEAKER_00: This is how a believer interacts with the truth of this.
SPEAKER_00: Spiritual reality is forever.
SPEAKER_00: You don't learn about spiritual relations by studying the physical.
SPEAKER_00: There is a physical resurrection.
SPEAKER_00: There's no marriage in heaven in that sense.
SPEAKER_00: That's what not what Edward is saying.
SPEAKER_00: Edward's saying there's a spiritual union, a spiritual reality.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus testifies to this as well.
SPEAKER_00: You'll go to heaven and you will meet friends in heaven that are there because of your investment in this world.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to have spiritual friends in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: When there are spiritual relationships, they transcend death.
SPEAKER_00: The skeptic looks at this and says, Oh, there's no such thing as the resurrection, because how do you explain somebody with multiple spouses?
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus comes to this and says, spiritual truth is spiritual truth and is forever.
SPEAKER_00: What an encouragement that is for husbands and wives and families.
SPEAKER_00: Heaven is a place of love.
SPEAKER_00: Heaven is a place where the Spirit reigns supreme.
SPEAKER_00: And that which is spiritual, wrought in our hearts by the Spirit of love, is indeed eternal.
SPEAKER_00: God, we're grateful for your word and thankful that it points us, really wrestles our eyes off of this world and on to the next.
SPEAKER_00: God, fill our hearts with love.
SPEAKER_00: Heaven is a place of love and charity and the realm of the Holy Spirit who draws us to Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Our hearts long to be with you in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Your spirit dwells in our hearts and draws us there.
SPEAKER_00: We're thankful for the gift of faith that we have and we cherish.
SPEAKER_00: It's in Jesus' name we pray.
unknown: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now, for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, DC area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.